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Minced Lamb
(Southern France.) Remove the fat and gristle from as much cold roast lamb as would fill 2 cups, and chop very fine. Cook it with an onion, a tablespoonful of butter, salt, pepper, some parsley and nutmeg. Add 1 cup of white stock or sauce, and the yolk of an egg. Cook carefully and pour on slices of toast, previously dipped in hot water and drained. Pour around some nice sauce, and garnish with parsley.
BEEF HASH (as cooked in Russia.) Chop 2 pounds of lean beef (or underdone roast beef.) with 1/4 pound of suet, 2 onions, some parsley, salt, and pepper. Add 1 cup of consomme and 1/2 cup of bread-crumbs. Stir well, pour into a mould, sprinkle with crumbs on top, and a spoonful of lemon juice. Bake until brown, and turn out on a border of mashed potatoes.
Two leftover-meat dishes given back to back, both built on the assumption that a roast joint sat in the larder waiting to be used up. Neither is difficult, but each has one step where it can go wrong.
- The egg yolk is the hingeOnce the yolk goes into the lamb, the pan must stay below a simmer or the sauce will curdle into grains. Take the pan off direct heat, stir the yolk in with a little of the hot liquid first, then return it briefly to gentle heat only until it thickens.
- Two cups of cold lambThat is roughly 10-12 oz of trimmed cooked meat, or what comes off the thin end of a small leg or shoulder. Chop it by hand with a knife; a food processor turns cooked lamb to paste.
- White stockVeal or chicken stock, unbrowned, was the standard base of the period. Unsalted chicken stock is the direct substitute; the alternative "sauce" the recipe allows means a plain white sauce of butter, flour and stock.
- Toast dipped in hot waterNot an error. Briefly dipping and draining dry toast softens it just enough to absorb sauce without collapsing. Use bread toasted firm, and dip for a second or two only.
- The "nice sauce" poured aroundThe recipe assumes some sauce or gravy already on hand; a thin veloute made from the same white stock, or the strained pan juices from the roast, would suit.
- Suet in the beef hashA quarter pound of beef suet to two pounds of lean meat is what keeps the baked loaf from drying. Butcher's suet or the fat trimmed from the roast both work; commercial shredded suet is often vegetable now and behaves differently.
- Baking the mouldThe book gives no oven setting beyond "bake until brown"; a moderate oven, about 350F, suits. A two-pound mould will take 50-60 minutes; if you have started from raw beef rather than underdone roast, take it to 160F in the centre.
- Turning outLet the mould stand five minutes before inverting or it will crack. Pipe or spoon the mashed potato into a ring on a warm platter first, then turn the loaf into the centre.
- YieldThe lamb serves two to three on toast; the beef mould serves four to six.
With a Saucepan over the Sea belongs to a genre popular around 1900: the collection of foreign dishes assembled for American housekeepers, each recipe tagged with a country like a souvenir label. The tags here are loose. Minced lamb bound with egg yolk and served on soaked toast is a general French household treatment of cold roast rather than anything specific to the south, and a baked beef loaf on a potato border is not distinctively Russian. What both dishes record is the economy of a house that roasted large joints: the second and third appearances of a leg of lamb mattered enough to be written down, and the mould, the border of piped potato and the parsley garnish were the means of making a remainder look like a course.